Document operations (Azure Cognitive Search REST API)

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In Azure Cognitive Search, an index is stored in the cloud and populated using JSON documents that you upload to the service. The fields collection of an index defines the structure of the search document. Fields have a name, data types, and attributes that determine how it is used. For example, searchable fields are used in full text search, and thus tokenized during indexing.

Queries target the documents collection of an index. In a service URL, the /docs parameter represents the collection. All operations performed on the collection such as uploading, merging, deleting, or querying documents take place in the context of a single index, so the URL format document operations will always include /indexes/[index name]/docs for a given index name.

To create search documents, application code must either generate JSON documents to upload to Azure Cognitive Search or you can use an indexer to serialize incoming documents into JSON.

Before you can upload documents, you must have already created the index on the service. See Create Index (REST API) or Create an index in the portal for instructions.

Operations on search documents

An admin API key is required for object management, but you can use a query API key for read-only access to the documents collection of an index. All query forms can accept a query API key.

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